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Emergency Medicine Residency

About Us

The University of Pittsburgh Emergency Medicine Residency was established in 1981 as a joint training program under the sponsorship of the Mercy Hospital of Pittsburgh, Presbyterian-University Hospital (both now part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center), and the Western Pennsylvania Hospital. For more than 30 years, the combined resources of our institutions, with their outstanding teaching staffs and varied patient populations, have offered our residents opportunities and experiences available in few other programs.

Our residents provide care in several affiliated emergency departments throughout the city, encompassing a range of specialty, community, and pediatric care. Altogether, these facilities treat more than 200,000 emergency patients per year.

Residents also have at their disposal the full resources of the Center for Emergency Medicine: the STAT MedEvac air medical service, the Bureau of Emergency Medical Services of the City of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Poison Center, and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. With this network of clinical and academic resources, the opportunities for training and research are truly unrivaled.

Philosophy

Our program's educational mission is centered on its commitment to five essential elements that must be cultivated in residents for their full development into emergency medicine specialists:

First, during their training, Emergency Medicine residents must acquire the knowledge, skills, and judgment necessary to become expert and compassionate clinicians. Implicit in this process is the need for a broad, humanistic perspective on medicine and patient care.

Second, Emergency Medicine residents should come to appreciate that physicians are teachers. Emergency physicians must be able to share their knowledge not only with other physicians but also with medical students, nurses, paramedics, EMTs, and lay people.

Third, a training program should kindle the resident's intellectual curiosity and nurture the spirit of inquiry that leads to the generation of new knowledge through both basic and applied research.

Fourth, residents must emerge from their training with the administrative sophistication they will need to carry out the wide variety of leadership tasks that generally fall to the emergency physician in both the academic and community settings.

Fifth, Emergency Medicine residents should be challenged to hold themselves to the highest standards of clinical excellence and intellectual achievement, and to look forward to a lifetime of continuing education and professional development. They should be inspired to see themselves as active contributors to the field - potential leaders whose role it will be to further the development of our specialty and to help define emergency medicine's place in the health care environment of the future.

Collegiality among residents and faculty is the most powerful influence in assuring that these goals are achieved. This inspired camaraderie explains why so many residents look back on their three years of training as among the most exciting of their lives.

The institutions that sponsor the University of Pittsburgh Emergency Medicine Residency program have committed themselves to an educational program that is dedicated to the training of such physicians - individuals who, by virtue of excellence in clinical care, education, research, and administrative and leadership skills, will be among the next generation of leaders in emergency medicine.

Leadership positions currently held by our graduates include:

Three Chief Medical Officers (Northwestern, University of Arizona/Maricopa, Emory)

One current and one immediate past SoM Deans (Albany, Tennesee-Chattanooga)

Recent two SAEM Leadership Awardees and previous recipients of all major SAEM and ACEP awards

19 current/former EM Academic Department Chairs (more than any other US EM unit)

Editors of 2 of 3 major EM texts, two highest impact EM journals, and the highest impact EMS journal